Incandescence

25

Rakesh sat in the kitchen of Lahl’s Promise, rearranging the rice in front of him with his fork, unable to bring himself to eat. He’d already missed three of his usual after-shift meetings with Zey, and the fourth one was looming. Without a clear answer to her plea, he did not know how he could face her.

“The Aloof knew all of this, I swear,” he told Parantham. “Maybe they followed the trail from the meteor, like we did, or maybe they already knew where it would end. But I don’t believe they brought us into the bulge because of dead microbes in a rock. They brought us here to see the state of the Arkdwellers. They brought us here to resolve this problem.”

“That might be true,” Parantham conceded. “But what does it change?”

“It makes me feel used, that’s what it changes.” Was this the reason Lahl had singled him out, back at the node? She had drilled straight into his soul, seen to the heart of his boredom and frustration, and known how powerfully a request like Zey’s would resonate for him?

“Used, how?” Parantham replied. “You think the Aloof are so morally finicky that they’d decline to throw this genetic switch themselves. but so morally bankrupt that they don’t mind contriving a situation where you feel pressured to do it for them? If they wanted to do it, they’d do it. If they were capable of understanding the Arkdwellers’ plight, they’d be capable of fixing it.”

“I’m not talking about technology,” Rakesh retorted. “Of course they could throw the switch if they wanted to. But they preferred to wash their hands of the matter, and make it someone else’s responsibility.”

Parantham seemed genuinely puzzled. “You mean, they asked for a second opinion on a difficult ethical question, from someone who they hoped would be better qualified? From a cousin of the Arkdwellers, a child of DNA?”

Rakesh wanted to strangle her.

Actually, what he wanted most of all was for Parantham to tell him that he had no right to intervene, and that he should leave the Arkdwellers to sleepwalk in peace. It was what he’d expected her to say when she heard Zey’s plea. Unfortunately, she’d failed to oblige.

He tried to back away from all the things that were frustrating him, and analyze the situation calmly one more time.

“The Arkdwellers had this genetic mechanism forced on them by their ancestors,” he said. “But it wasn’t done blindly or gratuitously; it carries some very clear advantages. It keeps them satisfied with the status quo when the status quo is working. It spares them the boredom and claustrophobia that they’d otherwise suffer, cooped up in a rock, orbiting a neutron star, with no other safe place to go. But when something comes along to threaten them—a challenge of cosmic proportions, the kind of thing their ancestors faced all the way back to the Steelmakers—their intellectual powers come out of hibernation, and they get the Enlightenment on overdrive.”

Parantham said, “Which is fine as far as it goes, but if some other kind of opportunity comes along—a chance to enlarge their horizons that isn’t accompanied by stress and danger—how can they even assess it properly, let alone take advantage of it?”

“They can’t,” Rakesh replied. “It’s impossible.”

“Except for Zey, and those like her.”

“Yes.”

“But the question then,” Parantham said, “is do the exceptional cases have the right to speak for the whole Ark? Zey has her own interests. If she wants to come visit the Amalgam, we can try to oblige her. But is she entitled to drag the whole of her society, without their consent, into her own state of mind?”

“Were the Arkmakers entitled,” Rakesh replied, “to sentence their children to fifty million years of docility? Yes, their intentions were impeccable, and yes, they were acting under pressure, desperately hunting for a way to keep their children alive while a neutron star was bearing down on them. But they couldn’t anticipate everything that the future would bring. Maybe they thought that when the next apocalypse-cum-renaissance arrived, their descendants would figure out everything and make a new set of choices for themselves—reengineering their own genome as they saw fit, to suit the next set of challenges. Maybe it was never their intention that their children would end up stranded with this ad hoc solution for so long; they just did their best and hoped that it would tide them over for a couple of million years.”

“Can we be sure, though,” Parantham wondered, “that this situation is entirely artificial? What if a similar mechanism had already evolved long before the neutron star approached the home world, and the Arkmakers were merely fine-tuning it?”

Rakesh said, “So if it’s natural, that changes everything?”

“No, but it’s not entirely irrelevant,” Parantham replied. “All your drives, all your values, all your priorities come from your biological ancestors. You’ve removed some drives, and strengthened others, but you didn’t sit down one day and say, ‘From first principles—ignoring all my inherited traits—what should I be like? How should I live? What should I value?’”

“All right, I take your point,” Rakesh said. “There are no such first principles. I risk plastering my own values all over the Ark. But if the Arkdwellers inherited this long winter of the mind—and some deep part of them cherishes it, the way I cherish various human things for no great, universal reason—they must have inherited the intellectual spring as well. I gave Zey a few simple science lessons; I didn’t colonize her brain with nanoware and turn her into something alien. What she represents is a part of everyone’s birthright, just as much as the alternative, docile state. It’s an accident of circumstances that’s put them in a place where that birthright can never be realized again, short of almost certain death. I mean, what’s going to tear them away from a neutron star, and still give them time to reboot their culture into a state that will let them defend themselves?”

Parantham fell silent. Rakesh pushed his plate aside. He could curse the Aloof all he wanted, he could listen to Zey, he could listen to Parantham, but Parantham could debate the pros and cons for a thousand years without coming down on one side. However much he hated it, this was in his hands alone. He could not walk away and pretend that he simply hadn’t seen the Ark, or go begging all around the disk for someone else to take responsibility.

He said, “What if we wake them all to the point where we can communicate with them meaningfully—the way I can communicate with Zey—and then let them choose for themselves? We can grant them an easy way to switch back to the docile mode, individually, if they want to. They can’t give consent for what I’m proposing, but putting them in a state where they can understand the question isn’t forcing them to remain that way. Zey’s state isn’t hermetically self-affirming: merely entering it doesn’t guarantee that you prefer it. Every individual will still have the power to reflect on their situation, and choose.”

Parantham considered this. “Suppose we do what you suggest. Then what happens next? Those who choose to revert remain in the Ark, obviously, but can they tolerate sharing it with a thousand restless Zeys, when their life doesn’t depend on that?”

“The rest explore the bulge, or come out to the disk with us.”

“Explore the bulge how?” Parantham demanded. “Do we have some promise from the Aloof that they’ll have access to the local network?”

“Well, no,” Rakesh conceded.

“Do we have a promise from the Amalgam that they’ll be allowed out into the disk?”

“You think they’ll be refused membership of the Amalgam, just because of the stunt the Aloof pulled with Lahl?”

Parantham said, “I think it will take a while to negotiate exactly what’s going to happen between the bulge and the disk. I think we need to go back and sort out that mess, before we start triggering an intellectual renaissance in a small, crowded place with no escape hatch.”

Rakesh couldn’t argue with her central concern. They couldn’t light this fire and then walk away, leaving the Arkdwellers to sort out the ensuing conflict. These people were stuck deep in a gravity well, with no planet to mine for materials, and no resources save the meager contents of the Ark itself and the thin plasma of the neutron star’s accretion disk. The Arkmakers had envisaged the switch being thrown in a time of crisis, but also a time of opportunity. Without a bridge leading away from the Ark itself, there was no opportunity. Leaving them to stew in their own frustration would be unconscionable.

“All right,” he said, “we have to clear the way to the disk. Go and come back. Hope the idiots in the disk let us out, and then hope the idiots in the bulge let us back in again.”

Parantham nodded, then started laughing with relief. “So that’s it? We’re agreed? This is your final decision?”

Rakesh hesitated. It would be thousands of years before they returned. The Ark would survive, and little would have changed, but Zey would be long dead.

If he went to her with this plan, this promise for the distant future, he knew what she would say. She would beg him to locate the spark in her mind, the thing that made her different from her team-mates, the thing that he had spoken to, nurtured and encouraged, shift after shift.

Then she would ask him to reach inside her and extinguish it.